Nuts and Bolts

most things that need pieces of metal to be attached to each other – have nails, screws, rivets, and bolts keeping them together. The nail was originally used to join pieces of wood together: a new concept to create more robust ships and furniture. Later, the screw vastly improved on the nail’s holding power, although it was much harder to make. Th

I selected these seven objects during the first 2020 lockdown in England, in the midst of a global pandemic. Trapped at home, I let my mind roam free, looking around at my possessions and the objects I could see from my window, and mentally (or sometimes physically) deconstructing them to see what lay inside. I revisited the ballpoint pen and saw i

Even as I thought about larger and more complex objects – diggers, skyscrapers, factories, tunnels, electrical grids, cars, satellites, and so on – again and again, I came back to the same seven foundational innovations. We join things together: the nail. We need something that rotates or revolves: the wheel. We need power, and technology that can

Inside all the human-made things around us are fundamental building blocks without which our complex machinery wouldn’t exist. At first glance, they might seem uninteresting. Often small, and sometimes hidden, the truth is that each of these elements is an extraordinary feat of engineering with fascinating stories that go back hundreds, if not thou

Far from the disappointing crayons of my early childhood, the insides of fountain pens and ballpoints contained slender cartridges and helical springs, held together with a top that threaded, screw-like, on to the rest of the pen.

I have been lucky enough to carry my childhood curiosity about what makes up objects with me into my career. As an engineer, I am endlessly fascinated by how our machines, buildings, and everyday objects came to be, and what lies at their heart – a fascination that, no doubt, many of you share.